Cost Analysis of Wind and Uranium from Seawater Acquisition symbiotic Infrastructure using Shell Enclosures
At current consumption rates, global conventional reserves of uranium, estimated to be 7.6 million tonnes, could be depleted in a little over a century. As these reserves decrease, extraction of uranium is expected to shift to lower quality sites, resulting in higher extraction costs and greater environmental impact. Fortunately, the ocean contains approximately 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, as uranyl ions at low concentrations of about 3 ppb. Uranium from seawater is a widely studied topic due to the long term security it can assure the nuclear fuel cycle. Additionally, harvesting uranium from seawater could reduce some of the environmental impacts associated with the recovery of land-based uranium. Seawater uranium is meant to create a cost ceiling that provides economic stability and potential savings, not to act as a direct competitor to terrestrial uranium. A recent review of uranium recovery technologies by found uranium adsorption by chelating polymers to be the most promising in terms of adsorbent capacity, environmental footprint, and cost. In this technology, chelating polymers are deployed in seawater and remain submerged until the amount of captured uranium approaches the adsorption capacity. Then, an elution bath is used to strip metal ions, such as uranium, off the adsorbent polymer. A polymer may be immersed in a number of elution baths before it is regenerated by an alkali wash to free its functional groups, allowing for the reuse of the polymer. The output from the elution process undergoes purification and precipitation typical for mined uranium to produce yellowcake. Offshore systems for the extraction of uranium from seawater have been developed since the early 2000's. The system currently studied by a nationwide consortium of national laboratory and university partners utilizes continuous adsorbent polyethylene fibers that are braided around a porous polypropylene float which can be made into long lengths. However, because this deployment scheme requires the adsorbent be brought to a mother-ship for the elution process and redeployed afterward, it has significant practical and economic deployment challenges. Detailed economic analysis have identified the adsorbent production and mooring as the most expensive components of the recovery process. Based on these results, proposed an alternative deployment method that is attached to an offshore wind turbine and continuously takes the adsorbent, that is fabricated into a belt, from the ocean through an elution process and before submerging it back into the sea. However, it has been found that adsorbents with high tensile strength and durability often have very low uranium adsorption properties. Hence, the Wind and Uranium from Seawater Acquisition symbiotic Infrastructure (WUSABI) previously studied, which requires the adsorbent into a belt held in tension, could face difficulties in an ocean environment. Instead, the design, further referred to in this paper as WUSABI-Koosh, utilized a two-part system to decouple the mechanical and chemical needs of an adsorbent for seawater harvesting of uranium. In these designs, the uranium adsorbent material with high adsorbent capacity is enclosed in a hard permeable outer shell with sufficient mechanical strength and durability for use in an offshore environment and chemical resilience against elution treatments. The integration of the design of a uranium harvesting system into an offshore wind turbine tower is pursued because the development of offshore wind or uranium harvesting by themselves bears a high capital cost for the structures, but if the mooring function can be shared, the overall cost for each will be lower. Furthermore, initial design analysis and prototyping of these symbiotic systems has proven they are technically feasible. This paper presents preliminary cost analysis for comparison to uranium recovery via alternative deployment schemes.